Category Archives: tftd

Would the largest number of raincoats designed to fit serious power armour suits from Planetside 2 clustered around the burial site of a popular entertainer be the max. grave MAX macs by Max Bygraves grave?

Plus ça change: I remember how any new MMO that launched would have a General Chat channel filled with proclamations of how much better the game was than World of Warcraft. I’ve been in two new MMOs recently, and I’ve seen none of that usual banter.

Plus c’est la même chose: Now everyone is jabbering on about how much better the game is than Star Wars: The Old Republic.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but for me Kickstarter is beginning to feel like a number of one night stands. Drunk with beneficent gamer’s glee, I’ve sowed my arbitrary funding oats across a number of projects now, but at mostly $10-$15 a shot I’m starting to lose track of what went where and with whom.

More to the point: in nine or so months I’ll start getting these strangers turning up, informing me that at some point in the past we were intimately involved, that I ‘gave them a donation’, before handing over a little bundle and telling me that ‘here, this is yours’.

I think the idea is pretty much Analogy Complete – it even has that layer of built-in guilt, considering that they did all the hard work over the subsequent months, and I just happened to be there at the start, throwing my sponsorship seed around with wild abandon.

Hmmm, perhaps I should instead start selecting the ‘No reward, I just want to donate’ option, the Kickstarter equivalent of donating to a sperm bank.

Mentoring systems –such as those seen in games like EQ2, CoH and STO– are still rarity in the genre, despite being an obvious enabler to allowing friends to play together. Yet most MMOs implement some form of PvP where players of varying levels are slammed together, with the level disparity ‘normalised’ by temporarily increasing the level of the lowest players.

Thus the system is often applied to PvP, where lower level players are more likely to be put off playing again because they are dramatically behind the power curve of higher level players (due the significant differential in equipment, number of powers, etc), and are in direct competition with those players.

Yet the system is often not applied to PvE, where lower level players are more likely to be prevented from playing with friends if they are dramatically behind the power curve of friends who are at a higher level, and are thus unable to join them in a cooperative effort.

It seems to me, at first glance, like a curiously backwards convention of design.

Mountain

In Skyrim I see a mountain and think ‘I’ve found a source of adventure.’

In a fantasy MMO I see a mountain and think ‘I’ve found another wall of the sheep pen.’

Abbreviations

“Level 21 tank LFG dung”

If you end up in a shitty PuG, at least you’ll know why.

Decision

If a player decides it’s better to jump from the top of the castle tower and die, then rez, rather than fight their way back down again, is the death penalty too low, the content too tiresome, or the player too jaded?

Applying the generic MMO philosophy to real life would mean that my boss asking me to write some code would inevitably result in me having to kill at least fifteen people or animals before the task was done.

Thankfully there is a distinct lack of wolves and boars hanging aimlessly around the office, but that pair of third floor accountants by the printer look as though they might aggro if I try to collect my hard copy.

I still find it interesting to consider ‘Why primarily combat?’ for a large number of MMOs. You may view that question in different ways depending on your prejudices, but it needn’t automatically be considered a failing of developers; indeed, many MMOs have tried other approaches without staggering success, so perhaps players have been seen to reject these alternatives. Again, though: why primarily combat?

Because combat provides an easy win condition? To satiate a fantasy which we cannot experience in real life? Because it is an easier system to encapsulate in lines of code than the alternatives? Because it’s a system which easily satisfies the input–>reward philosophy of gaming? Because we have yet to be offered alternatives which provide the exhilaration of the fight?

I’m not sure of the answer –or whether there even is an answer– otherwise this would have been the Revelation of the Day.

You know you’ve been playing a certain MMO too much when you walk past a door labelled ‘Project Room’ at work first thing in the morning, and your fuzzy mind interprets it as a project room.

I wonder if the Jedi have project rooms? Huge rooms with padded walls, full of oversize bean bags, enormous soft toys, and giant cushions, which the warrior monks can fling at one another with impunity. I always wondered why the Jedi Council looked so ruffled and out of breath every time they spoke to Anakin and Obi-Wan. If you watch closely during The Phantom Menace you can even see Mace Windu trying to discreetly hide a teddy bear that got lodged in the hood of his robes.

And pillow fights at Jedi pyjama parties suddenly take on a new and exciting outlook.

M’colleague and I were discussing his intention to order the Digial Deluxe Edition of the forthcoming Star Wars: The Old Republic. His comment “And an in-game flare gun that serves no purpose has to be worth [an extra] £20, right?” had us looking at exactly what you get for your intergalactic space bucks.

The item that stood out for me was the HoloCam: ‘Keep visual records of in-game adventures.’ To which my immediate response was “Wow, they’re going to make screenshots a feature that’s purchasable from the in-game store”.

But then I realised that they aren’t going to have an in-game store. (Or are they? Ahhhhhhh!)

But then I considered all the trouble people reported having with taking screenshots in the recent stress test, as though the functionality was deliberately absent or hobbled, perhaps because the feature might be something which could be enabled by, say, an in-game HoloCam (free with the Digital Deluxe Edition or purchasable from the in-game store that doesn’t exist or does it ahhhhhhhhhh).

But then I thought that that was an incredibly unlikely and cynical supposition: that enabling screenshot (and video recording) functionality only when the player possessed an RMT-purchasable in-game item would open the floodgates to all sorts of the worst kind of micro-transaction-based shenanigans.

But then I observed that I had a cup of tea and a chocolate HobNob on the desk in front of me. And in the end, isn’t that all that really matters?

With Google+ and Facebook enforcing the use of “real” names (whatever they might be; Charlie Stross has a fine take on it all), perhaps this is the beginning of the end of nicks, handles and “Cool Internet Names”. Unless the social networks can somehow tap in to biometric data and government records, though, I’m not sure they can do much about “Not Technically ‘Real’ But Entirely Plausible Internet Names”; I wonder just how many Luther Blissets are signing up…